MRI's successes put the brain on trial

March 9, 2010

A typical neuroscience paper (or a typical report on one) is a laundry list of structure:function relationships between brain regions and the mental tasks they perform. The amygdala deals with registering rewards, the hippocampus handles memory, and so on. These relationships have been the result of over a century of work, starting with rare cases of brain injury and building through modern medical imaging, which can detect ever-smaller lesions and associate neural activity with specific cognitive processes. Doctors routinely rely on the combination of brain imaging and structure:function relationships for diagnostic purposes, but is wider society willing to trust it in the courtroom, where it might make the difference between guilt and innocence?

That question was handled in a rather unusual manner at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: a mock trial. Most other panels consisted of a set of scientists who each gave a fairly standard presentation. This one was presided over by Louis Rodriguez, an Orange County Superior Court Judge, and featured a law school professor and a practicing attorney, each with a neuroscientist as an expert witness. Although the proceedings were heavily scripted, anyone who's sat through a jury trial would recognize that they were a reasonable attempt to approximate a normal courtroom experience.



Read the comments on this post